A screen shot of Amazon service health dashboard
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Amazon’s European websites Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.at, went offline for about a half an hour on Sunday.
The downtime, which began around 1:15 p.m. PST Sunday, was caused by the failure of several network hardware devices, putting to rest previous speculation that the outage was caused by an attack from WikiLeaks supporters.
Amazon Web Services updated its Service Health Dashboard Monday morning, reporting that EC2 services in its EU-West region, which is hosted in an Ireland data center, experienced performance issues between 12:37 p.m. and 2:32 p.m.
“These errors were caused by the malfunction of a second network device carrying traffic that had recently been shifted off of another failed network device,” Amazon reported. “The first device was nearly repaired but, unfortunately, was still unusable when the second device independently failed. Because full redundancy had not been restored to this part of our network, this second failure resulted in an interruption of connectivity for the EU EC2 API servers. Our networking team was able to re-route traffic to restore connectivity and, shortly afterward, complete repairs on both network devices involved.”
This, in turn, has affected many other sites as Amazon EC2 provides hosting for more than a third of all Web-facing servers in Ireland.
Amazon Web Services said the incident may prompt it to redouble its efforts to have backup hardware available on-site.
The Anonymous group, according to some sources, cancelled its scheduled attack against Amazon.com Thursday after it determined that it did not have enough voluntary botnets to have a significant impact on Amazon’s infrastructure.
According to an annoucement posted online last week, purporting to be on behalf of the collective, while parts of Anonymous were, and are, for attacking Amazon, the main reason the attack has not happened yet is a desire not to negatively impact innocent holiday shoppers
The organization reiiterated this message via its unofficial Twitter stream: “WE REPEAT: We can not attack Amazon.com. To some journalists: check your sources well please.”
Amazon disconnected WikiLeaks website’s cloud hosting service last month after controversy escalated following the site’s publishing of 250,000 US cables.
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